Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Essay: Give Them Hope 11.1.10

Tomorrow is Election Day, and the candidates are making a last final push. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks there was something missing from this year’s campaign.

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Traditionally, this would have been the last day of the campaign season. It used to be considered bad form to continue hustling for votes on Election Day. That was when the people were supposed to be left to the sanctity of the voting booth to decide.

Richard Nixon once even went to Mexico on Election Day, to have a relaxed lunch away from the cameras before the returns.

Of course, it also used to be an axiom that nobody paid serious attention to any campaign until after the World Series, which used to end in early October. Nowadays, they play major league baseball from March till November, and this year’s series may not be over till after the election.

And you can bet that Rick Snyder, Virg Bernero, and everybody else running for anything else will be on the phones, at the polls and in front of the cameras tomorrow hustling for every last vote.

Sometimes, that may make sense. Ask Dan Benishek, who this year won the GOP nomination for Congress from northern Michigan by a mere fifteen votes. The length of today’s campaigns doesn’t bother me, at least not as much as the thought of playing the World Series in the snow. But something else has been bothering me about this year’s campaign, something I couldn’t figure out at first.

Then the other night I was watching a movie called Enemy at the Gates, about the battle for Stalingrad. Worried Soviet generals were trying to figure out how to make their men fight better.

They had tried shooting cowards and threatening the men’s families. Finally, a junior officer says, “What about giving them hope?”

His superiors are stunned. What an amazing idea! Give the men hope in a better future! They try that, and it works.

That was the problem with this year‘s campaign. Nobody, as far as I could tell, has been offering Michigan much hope.

That wasn‘t the main message they conveyed, anyway. Bernero flirted with a theme of bringing back our old-time prosperity, though he didn’t exactly say how. But he was soon working overtime trying to scare the voters, telling them that Snyder would send our last remaining jobs to China, and threaten women’s reproductive rights. Snyder said he had a ten-point plan and the business know-how to bring Michigan back. But his campaign was mainly focused on bashing the Democrats. This was repeated all across the state and, so far as I could tell, across the nation.

There seemed to be a universal slogan: Vote For Me: My Opponent is Even Worse.

That doesn’t do much to inspire.

I have this fantasy that I’ll turn the TV on tonight, and see one of the candidates saying: “Look, we’re facing tough times ahead. We’re going to have to pay more taxes and maybe get fewer services on top of that. We’re going to have some pain, but when all is said and done, I think we can build a better Michigan.

“And I want you to give me your vote.”

That’s the candidate I wish we could vote for tomorrow. Sadly, I’m afraid we‘ll have to make do instead with the ones we have.

Essay: Does Anyone Believe?

We’re four days from what’s being called one of the most important elections in state history. Yet Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks the public is curiously disengaged.

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We’re four days from an election in which we will pick a new governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of state. We’ll also choose a mostly new legislature, and determine which party controls the Michigan Supreme Court.

We’ll decide whether to have a constitutional convention, whether felons should be presented from holding office after they complete their terms, and decide a whole range of other offices. We’ll do all that Tuesday -- which is to say, a minority of us will. Unless Michigan defies a long-standing historical trend, fewer than half the eligible voters will vote in this election.

Looked at one way, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. We are facing a crisis of historic magnitude. The new governor and legislature will face a deficit approaching two billion dollars with no more stimulus money and absolutely no fat left in the state budget.

They can either raise taxes, which for today’s Republican Party pretty much amounts to a sacrilege, or they can slash funding to essential services, including higher education.

Everyone in either party who is well-informed knows that Michigan’s only hope is vastly increasing the education level of our workforce. Nobody can make decent living anymore with just a high school degree, and having a bachelor’s degree without a particular skill set isn’t worth much today either.

We’ve lost nearly a million jobs in this state, and kids are emerging into the bleakest job market since the Great Depression.

So, you’d think there would be great interest in this election, and in what competing solutions the candidates for governor were proposing to make life better for us all.

But the candidates, especially front-runner Rick Snyder, have gotten away with really not saying very much. We know that Snyder would replace the Michigan Business Tax with another tax that would add to the state’s deficit, at least in the short run.

We know that Virg Bernero is against outsourcing jobs to China, and that he’d start some form of state bank. But I haven’t much of a clue how either man would deal with the deficit.

They’ve been ducking questions, and the press has let them get away with it. Political coverage this year has been reduced to analyzing the campaign commercials, which range between totally false and largely irrelevant, and something even worse:

Obsession with the polls. Who is going to win? Is it too late for to close the gap? Whose negatives are up? Journalists who should be offering intelligent policy analysis instead sound like a bunch of characters around the betting window at a race track.

And what may be most disturbing is that the public doesn’t seem engaged either. To some extent, that’s surely because of the intellectual emptiness of this campaign.

But I’m afraid it is also because people have lost faith in the ability of politics and government to make a real difference in our lives. The men and women in Ann Arbor who half a century ago urged John F. Kennedy to start the Peace Corps were different.

They believed Kennedy when he said “one person can make a difference, and every person should try.” I’d feel a whole lot better if any of this year’s candidates made us feel that way too.

Essay: Real Losers - 10.22.10

Attention has been so focused on the elections that few have noticed that many workers will lose their unemployment benefits by the end of next month. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been thinking about them.

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We’re less than two weeks away from statewide elections, and much of the media has been intently focused on who is going to win and lose on election night. What few are talking about, however, is a much larger group of people who are losing big-time, right now.

What economists call “The Great Recession” hit Michigan earlier and harder than anywhere else.

And now hundreds of thousands of Michiganders are coming to the end of their unemployment benefits. In normal times, people who lose their jobs are eligible to collect benefits for a maximum of twenty-six weeks, or six months. The most they can get is $362 dollars a week, out of which they have to pay federal taxes.

That amounts, by the way, to a gross income of just under nineteen thousand dollars a year. That’s considerably less, by the way, than it costs to keep somebody in prison.

Since times have been so bad, Congress has extended the eligibility period in hard-hit states like Michigan to a maximum of ninety-nine weeks for some workers, or just less than two years. But even that has proven not to be enough, in a world where there are eight and a half job seekers for every available job.

Now, a huge number of former workers are running out of time. According to the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency, 142,733 workers will lose their last benefits by November 30.

That’s pretty grim news, with the first chill of winter in the air. Things get worse from there. By the end of April, that number is expected to more than double, to more than 324,000.

The number of people affected by this is, of course, larger, since some of these folks are supporting families. The ripple effect on the already battered Michigan economy will be further devastating.

Those losing their final benefits, by the way, aren’t overwhelmingly in any one region of the state. Nearly half are in the tri-county Metropolitan Detroit area, but that’s close to that region’s share of the state’s population.

Eleven thousand workers in the county including Grand Rapids lose benefits; ten thousand in the Flint area. Senator Debbie Stabenow has introduced legislation further extending unemployment benefits. But its future is, at best, uncertain.

Whatever happens in the elections, the new Congress is expected to be more conservative than the old. While military spending remains high, there is growing concern about the ballooning federal deficit, now by far the largest in history.

But nobody seems to have devoted much thought to what is going to become of our state’s hundreds of thousands of hopelessly long-term unemployed. Congressman Gary Peters has introduced a sensible bill that would allow them to withdraw funds from their IRA retirement accounts without paying the usual penalty.

Unfortunately, it has been languishing in committee, as the wife of an unemployed former Chrysler worker told me yesterday.

Passing both bills would seem to be common sense -- especially from the standpoint of those who still have jobs.

Large deficits may make us uneasy. But I would think that the prospect of hundreds of thousands of desperate folks who lack money, jobs or hope ought to make us uneasier still.

Essay: Poll Obsession - 10.21.10

The opinion polls have consistently shown Rick Snyder is ahead in the race for governor. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry has been wondering whether polls themselves are a good idea at all.

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The one thing everybody seems sure about in the current race for governor is that Rick Snyder is ahead in the polls. We don’t have any clear idea what he would do to balance the budget.

We’re not sure what he would do to give our universities the money they need to adequately educate the workforce Michigan needs. Actually, we’re not too sure how he stands on a broad range of issues, from privatization of the state’s workforce to the proposed internationally owned bridge across the Detroit River.

Nor is the state’s press corps working especially hard to find out. There are also many questions about Virg Bernero, his opponent, and what sort of policies he would adopt.

But we do know that Snyder is ahead by twenty percent in the polls. In fact, there is a new poll every few days that says much the same thing. This seems to be necessary so that Lansing pundits can pontificate on things like whether the Democrats should now put their money behind Secretary of State candidate Jocelyn Benson.

But is this what political reporting should be all about? True, reporting poll results is easier than trying to dig around to find out what the candidate would really do in office.

Or what his policies would really mean for our state. Since we’ve been telling voters over and over that this race is over, is there any wonder that people are apathetic about it?

More and more, I think the way we cover elections in this country is a disgrace. The only poll that counts occurs in voting booths on November. We’ve got an immense crisis in this state, and there are precisely two men who conceivably could be elected and face the task of trying to lead us out of this mess.

So, it would seem to me that we should concentrate more on who they are, what they would do, and what they are all about.

There are some people who do rise above this. I talked to one the other day. Jennifer is a 59-year-old woman who grew up in Ann Arbor, but never had the chance to go to college, because she had to help raise her siblings after her daddy died.

She’s highly intelligent, politically independent, and works several jobs, including that of a textbook buyer. Been married for more than thirty years; raised three sons; lives in the house her parents built. Her big political moment came a long time ago, when she was a Catholic schoolgirl, and the nuns lined up her class to shake hands with a candidate named John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

She and some friends watched the debate between the candidates for governor, and decided they’d vote for Virg Bernero. “I don’t know -- he just seemed more sincere. More like he had an idea what he wanted to do. The other one was sort of a corporate talker.“

Perhaps she is a complete anomaly. But I thought it was interesting that she felt that way. Besides knowing what the candidates stand for, it would be nice to hear more in this campaign about some real people, and what they think about it.

Even if that means we skip an opinion poll now and again.

Essay: What We Should Ask - 10.20.10

Michigan gubernatorial candidates Rick Snyder and Virg Bernero are making a lot of promises, but Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says there’s one big question they haven’t answered.

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Last night I presided over a fascinating meeting in Grand Rapids, the second in Michigan Radio’s “Issues and Ale” series designed to stimulate public discussion.

The main event was a look at this year’s campaign advertising by two members of the “Michigan Truth Squad,” John Bebow, director of the non-partisan Center for Michigan, and Susan Demas, perhaps the best columnist in Lansing.

They are doing their best to analyze as many spots as possible and rate them on their truthfulness. You may not be surprised to learn that most of today’s ads bear only a passing relationship to reality.

In fact, Dr. Grins’ Comedy Club was the perfectly appropriate place for this. But what I found even more interesting than the truth squad were the questions from our large and very aware audience.

The very first question was extremely perceptive. A gentleman noted that Michigan was facing a huge budget crisis next year, and that whomever takes over as governor will inherit a deficit of at least $1.6 billion dollars. So how are they going to balance the budget?

What’s more, either Virg Bernero or Rick Snyder would immediately make that figure worse -- if they keep their promises. Bernero wants to get rid of the 22 percent surcharge on the Michigan Business Tax. That may be a good idea from the standpoint of attracting business, but would add to the state budget deficit.

Rick Snyder, the Republican, wants to abolish the Michigan Business tax entirely, and replace it with a six percent corporate income tax. That would make the deficit worse still.

The gentleman in Grand Rapids knew that the state budget has to be legally balanced by the end of next September. So, why isn’t either candidate telling us how they would manage that?

That’s the question we all should be asking them.

Both candidates are in fact fighting hard to avoid giving you an answer, and especially to avoid giving you an honest one.

That’s because they fear the truth will lose them votes. What they are going to have to do is either raise taxes or cut services drastically and dramatically raise the cost of things like college tuition. Most likely, they’ll have to do both.

The math is simple. There are no other choices, but they don’t want to tell us that. Once upon a time, we had great leaders who called on us to sacrifice for the common good.

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. Working class Americans taxed themselves to better educate their children. Nowadays, politicians tell us any tax increase would be terrible. We tell them, “Keep cutting government, but don’t you dare give me any less than I get now.“

Something’s got to give. Nearly half a century ago, my unreformed fifth grade teacher made us learn simple math. If I got my times tables wrong, I was whacked with a ruler.

I haven’t the foggiest notion of what old Miss Hutson’s politics were. But I am sure that on hearing their fuzzy math, she would have taken the ruler to both Snyder and Bernero.

And I think the rest of us just might deserve it as well.

Essay: Dying on The Trail - 10.19.10

State Representative Robert Jones of Kalamazoo died in his home Sunday morning. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry wonders why he was running for office this year.

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State Representative Robert Jones was an enormously popular former mayor of Kalamazoo who was in an intense battle to win a seat in the state senate. Intense, but not nasty.

Even in the present, bitter partisan atmosphere, people appeared to genuinely like Mr. Jones, who one friend described as the “guy with the curly little mustache and the huge smile.” Those people included his opponent, Republican Tonya Schuitmaker, who had a hard time saying anything bad about him.

But two days ago, Robert Jones suddenly died in his home, throwing the race into chaos and elections officials into a tizzy.

Legally, dead people’s names aren’t supposed to appear on the ballot. The ones that will be used two weeks from today can perhaps be reprinted, at what I imagine will be considerable expense.

But absentee ballots have gone out and, in some cases, already have been returned. What’s to be done about those?

The Democratic party has to scramble to name a new candidate, who then has to try to make her or his case to the voters in less than two weeks’ time.

Journalism is sometimes about telling unpleasant truths that nobody wants to hear, and here’s one of those. Tributes have been flooding in, praising Robert Jones as a lawmaker, friend and leader.

But the truth, as I see it, is that he had no business running for office this year. Jones had esophageal cancer; he had been fighting it for more than a year. I do not know for certain that this is what killed him, though two days before he died a friend said he appeared to be in pain, and that it was difficult for him to speak.

But he knew he was gravely ill. Being a state senator is a full-time job, and he had to have known that even in the best case scenario, fighting cancer would take up time and energy. Sadly, Robert Jones is far from alone.

Throughout history, candidates have campaigned, sometimes even when they were dying, sometimes going to great lengths to conceal their true condition from the voters.

When the late Paul Tsongas ran for president in 1992, he and his doctors repeatedly said he was cancer-free when it fact he was not. He did not win the Democratic nomination that year, but if he had been elected, he would have died in office during his first term.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a dying man when he was last elected president during World War II. Within three months, the leadership of the nation fell to a vice-president who had no preparation whatsoever for the enormous responsibilities of the job.

Fortunately, that turned out all right. But it wasn’t fair to the voters. In recent years, we’ve been treated to the spectacle of a senile Strom Thurmond and a dying Robert Byrd holding down seats in the U.S. senate. Public office requires responsibility to the public.

Robert Jones was a fine mayor, state representative, and man. But he did his district and his party a disservice by running for office when he was gravely ill. It’s not to much to ask that our elected leaders be honest with us, and be physically up to the job.

Essay: Election Dilemmas - 10.15.10

We’re going to be voting for a lot more candidates than we may realize this year. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry isn’t sure that this always makes sense.

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I think I’m better informed than most people about government, politics, and candidates running for office. After all, my job is to find out about them, and share interesting and relevant information with you.

But there are races and candidates on this year’s ballot that even I know virtually nothing about. For example, I live in Oakland County.

County residents elect the members of the governing board of Oakland Community College, which is a highly important institution. It has five campuses and seventy-seven thousand students. My problem was that I didn’t feel qualified to vote here. I knew absolutely nothing about any of the candidates for the board. By the way, I always get a sample ballot for precisely this reason. I know there will be some things and people I need to research.

This time I called someone I know whose judgment I trust who served on the Oakland Community College board. She helped me make informed choices.

But how many people have the connections to do that? Those who do tend to vote in these races tend to go for familiar-sounding names like O’Brien and Kelly. For a statewide example, voters also elect members of the state board of education, the governing boards of Michigan’s three major universities, Wayne State, Michigan State, and the University of Michigan.

But those candidates aren’t chosen by education experts. The Republican and Democratic parties pick them. How does the average restaurant manager in Grand Rapids or factory worker in Flint figure out who to vote for? Many don’t even try. Many people who split their tickets don’t vote in these races at all.

But here’s what happens: If you vote a straight ticket, Republican or Democratic, it records votes for either party’s university board nominees.

Two years ago, more people cast straight-party votes for the Democrats, and their nominees won. Twelve years ago, when Governor John Engler won by a landslide, more people voted the straight Republican ticket, and all their school board nominees except one beat the Democrats.

The only Democrat survivor that year had the magic last name of Kelly. This year, each party has one seat at stake on the Michigan Supreme Court.

Two incumbent justices, one from each party, are running for re-election. Being on the court already is in itself a huge advantage. That’s because it says right there on the ballot that the candidate is an incumbent Supreme Court justice.

The challengers might as well be labeled, “Brand X.” The Republicans really want to defeat the newest Democratic Justice, Alton Davis.

So how do they plan to overcome the huge advantage being an incumbent gives him? One guess. That’s right. They nominated a challenger named Mary Beth Kelly. Incidentally, if you can’t name the justices on our state’s highest court, you aren’t alone. Rick Snyder, the Republican nominee for governor, was asked on television if he knew who the chief justice was. He said he didn’t know how to pronounce their name.

Their name happens to be, by the way, Marilyn Kelly. I suppose this way of choosing people for these important but lesser-profile jobs may seem like a good idea if you are an ambitious politician named Kelly.

But the rest of us might want to think about whether this system, which was established by the current state constitution, is really working for us.

Essay: Debatable - 10.11.10

Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry thinks that after last night’s debate between the candidates for governor we might want to look past the conventional wisdom -- and press the candidates for some answers.

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Here’s what I was thinking about when I watched the one-and-only debate between the candidates for governor last night.

Everybody, especially the so-called chattering classes of the media, knew that this election was already decided. The Democratic nominee was a little man who got the prize by accident.

The Republican was much better educated, far richer, and more accomplished in the “real world.” Democrats had been in power for a relatively long time, and times weren’t good.

So it was clearly time for a change. True, the Democrat was a plucky little fighter. He pitched his campaign at poor, working and middle class voters. Said he wanted to give them better lives --even if it cost the rich more in terms of taxes than now.

But the talking heads dismissed this as tasteless demagoguery. The Republican knew he had the election won, that the only way he could blow it was by making a mistake. So he mainly talked in vague generalities, and said he was against waste, fraud and abuse.

Now, you may think everything I’ve just said was about the governor’s race between Virg Bernero and Rick Snyder. And everything fits. But actually, I was thinking of the long-ago presidential race between Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey.

Everybody was so certain the Republican was going to win that newspapers set their headlines in type. The Detroit Free Press called on Truman to resign the day after the election so that Dewey could take office early. But guess what:

Truman won the election easily, in the greatest upset in American political history. Turned out people liked him, and didn’t confess to the pollsters their sneaking sympathy for the underdog.

Now I am not predicting that will happen here. History seldom repeats itself, and things are very different in this election. Nor am I any kind of Bernero partisan. In fact I have been exasperated by his endless and largely irrelevant China-bashing. He has also improperly tried to make abortion an issue, when there is no evidence Snyder would do anything to try to change abortion policy.

But by any measure, Bernero, who has been running for various offices for what seems like forever, clearly won this debate. Whether you agree with him or not, he presented a more specific picture about what he would try to do as governor.

The reporters asking questions were, I thought, harder on Bernero than on Snyder. Nobody asked the Republican candidate, a venture capitalist and former Gateway computer executive, how he expected to execute the complex task of governing when he has never served a day in government at any level.

Instead, he was asked if he could be “tough,” whatever that means. Mostly, Snyder spouted talking points, saying things like “we need an attitude of action,“ and referring viewers to his ten-point plan on his website, which itself is short on specifics.

The Lansing mayor also made what I thought was the night’s best and most thoughtful statement, when he said “we can’t afford to be ideologically biased. If (something) is working, we keep it.

“If not, we throw it out.” We could do with a shot of pragmatism in these troubled times. Now, we need to push both candidates to tell us honestly how they would close next year’s vast budget deficit.

Good luck with that.

Essay: The Abortion Issue, II - 10.4.10

State legislatures, including Michigan’s, are constantly attempting to set new abortion policy. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry still doesn’t think that’s an issue that belongs in this year’s gubernatorial campaign.

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Two weeks ago, I argued that too much attention was being paid to the abortion issue in the current gubernatorial campaign. Among other things, I said: “The governor of Michigan does not make abortion policy, and really can’t do anything about abortion, even if he or she wants to.” My reasons for that were simple.

Women have had an essential right to terminate a pregnancy, especially in its earliest stages, since the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade in 1973. No state or even national law can overturn that. Several attempts to do so have been ruled unconstitutional.

The only way that ruling can be changed is by another U.S. Supreme Court decision, or a constitutional amendment.

As a result, I suggested that abortion policy has no place in the current gubernatorial debate. Michigan has vast economic problems, and we have had longstanding issues over the fact that our state government isn’t working very well.

Additionally, now that all the federal stimulus money is gone, the state is facing the mother of all deficit crises next year.

My point was that these are issues that our next governor and next legislature can do something about, and should be focusing on. However, several listeners have said I was incorrect when I said that there is nothing a governor can do about the abortion issue. And, in fact, my critics are right.

No state can directly prohibit abortion. But lawmakers in Michigan as well as across the nation are constantly trying to test the margins of Roe vs. Wade in one way or another.

For example, the Michigan senate passed a bill last week requiring doctors to first give any woman who wants an abortion the most advanced ultrasound picture of the fetus possible.

They are hoping that when the woman sees an image that looks like a baby, she will change her mind and not have an abortion.

Planned Parenthood opposes this. They think this is intruding politics into a medical procedure.

But many opponents of abortion think the procedure is state-sanctioned murder, and that they have a religious and moral duty to try and stop it, or at least limit it as far as possible.

They know that today’s U.S. Supreme Court has a different set of justices than the ones who decided Roe vs. Wade, and that many are more conservative on social issues.

They are hoping to get some case before the court that will give them an opportunity to overturn that decision.

And that could happen sometime, though as a principle of jurisprudence the Supreme Court has always been reluctant to overturn any of their previous decisions, especially one that recent.

Still, abortion opponents have every right to try to make that happen, or to try for a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion.

However, that’s not what those elected to run Michigan’s government should be focusing on. Nor is there any reason to think that either of the major candidates is out to change abortion policy, despite some misleading TV commercials.

Abortion is an important societal issue. But not one that belongs in the governor’s race this year. The candidates need to talk about ways Michigan can balance its books, educate its children, maintain its infrastructure and attract jobs.

That, after all, is what state government is for.

Essay: Adolescent Behavior - 9.28.10

It looks like the Michigan budget may be complete before Thursday night’s deadline, meaning another shutdown will be avoided. But Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry says the real problems are still ahead.

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Do you remember those kids in school who always put off doing everything --- projects, big term papers -- till the last minute?

Then, they would pull an all-nighter and get something done that they could turn in. It sometimes got a passing grade. But even when the kid was really, really bright, what they turned in was never as good as it should have been.

I remember kids like that because I used to be one, until at some point, I made the painful decision to be a grownup.

That’s a decision that the members of our Michigan legislature mostly have managed to avoid. There hasn’t been a lot of noticeably adult behavior there. That’s especially true when it comes to the state budget. Remember, their goal was to get it all done before July 1, when most cities and school systems start their fiscal year.

That would have made sense for a lot of reasons. Schools, for example, would have known how much money they could count on.

The lawmakers also would have been serving the people they care about most -- themselves. All their seats are up for election five weeks from now. Most of them are running for something.

The last thing they wanted was to be under the Capitol dome right now, trying at the last minute to balance the budget before the state is forced into another temporary shutdown.

But that’s where they are, fifty-nine hours before the clock runs out, trying to cobble together the last few departmental budgets. The good news is that it is almost certain that they will do it.

We’ll avoid yet another nationally embarrassing moment. But they should be embarrassed that it has taken them this long.

They might be able to justify it if they had done some bold, structural revision that fixed what is deeply wrong with the process. Right now, they way they do things is guaranteed to produce a deficit every year. Imagine you were doing your household budget and decided, “You know, I’ll bet this will be the year that Bill Gates gives us a hundred thousand, out of the blue.” My guess is that by the end of the year, you too would be running a sizable deficit.

The budget that the legislature is about to pass isn’t really balanced in the classic sense. It relies, for one thing, on faith.

The lawmakers passed a bill speeding up the time in which unclaimed property reverts to the state, and also is counting on revenue from a tax amnesty plan. Economists say the politicians are counting on much more from this than they’ll really receive.

Plus, they only really managed to get close to a balanced budget by using hundreds of millions Washington unexpectedly gave us. This was money supposed to be used for education and Medicaid, but our lawmakers used sleight-of-hand to throw it into the deficit hole. Most of them don’t have to worry; thanks to term limits, they will be gone next year. That’s when the budget deficit is projected to be $1.6 billion, with no more federal money in sight.

Which makes me think that there may well be two big losers in the coming gubernatorial election. One will get fewer votes. The other will go to Lansing and have to deal with this mess.